Tuesday, January 29, 2013

Thoughts from the Editor ~ Stand In The Place Where You Live

I have just finished my move to southern Indiana; the fair city of Bloomington. With a college campus less than 20 minutes away by bike, the average population in the summer, while school is not in session, is a modest 30 to 40 thousand. [During the school year, it skyrockets to over 100 thousand.]

As much as I like academics, and having a college library [and theater] nearby -- I am here for the locals. The farming folks, the permaculture -- the real culture -- a community that is rooted in something other than entertainment, automobile culture, uptown/downtown thought processes. I'm here for realness.

I have often said that I love Indianapolis -- I still do. But the city has changed -- or perhaps it never did but I have. At any rate, that old saying holds true for both sexes: You can take a girl out of the country...but you can't take the country out of the girl.

I grew up in rural farmland that became a concrete jungle of fast food joints and strip malls. Some of my favorite farms to look at while biking have become ruins on the outskirts of new housing editions, side by side cracker boxes, lined along beloved two-lane roads that used to hold surprises at every turn. Now, they seem like a distant memory. Now...those houses look like barracks.

This past summer found me in the desert of New Mexico and the city of El Paso, Texas. The vast difference between the West and where I came from, eventually left me longing for home. A place I've been searching for quite awhile now, to be honest. The desert has her own language -- it whispers rather than speaks aloud -- but her messages were quite clear to me about where I needed to be. Closer to the country I grew up around -- the trees, hills and grass, the creeks and tributaries -- the gravel roads I used to travel down in my youth, just to escape the small minded-world I lived in to see the night stars and wish...

That world is still small-minded. Perhaps it always was.

I realized I need not have traveled far to gain this -- but to understand it...to know it in your bones, is a far different story. You simply won't realize what you have until you learn that it could be gone tomorrow. What I saw on my journeys these past years solidified a bigger truth for me. I have always been blessed by humble beginnings. Many cities, burbs and towns have changed beyond recognition. My hometown is not much different than many I visited but it hasn't changed so much that it defies memory.

I understand with great clarity that this is not true for many. I understand that landscapes, mountains, rivers and lakes have been defiled, grasslands laid to waste and blue skies replaced by tinges of burnt umber and smog.

It wasn't always this way. The elders could tell you. They could show you photographs that would take your breath away. Tell you stories about the finest fishing and the best creeks to draw a canteen-full of spring water. I remember these kinds of places from my youth, too. They are few and far between now.

The journey I set out upon was about seeking the highest truth -- and in my travels, I learned what I had always known -- that the truth is right under your feet. To deny the love of the earth you stand on is to be buried under the waste of a civilization that cares nothing for the sacred. I understand with great clarity what it means to love a piece of land.

What my bones know is what I want to express via radio -- because the writing has taken a backseat to experiences yet again -- and news is happening faster than I can keep up with. It is simply easier to speak than write now. My goal is to invite discussion and questions about the sacred, core values of human beings -- to really get to the heart of the matter and get some damn healing done.

We've been lied to, exploited, spied on, sold out, cheapened, dumbed down -- and yet begged for more? I didn't. I know we all didn't. I don't believe that. I don't believe that because that is what the mainstream is selling...again. Numbers are fudged on a daily basis. Between polls and stats -- all the way up to and including Wall Street indexes -- we're being collectively duped and made to feel as if we're really clever because we've been spoonfed what we're supposed to think about the whole ponzi.
Even from the faces on the talking box we've trusted all this time.

Bottom line? The majority of media 'in the main' wears me the fuck out. So I'm going to learn something new, share it and include others in the process of getting new ideas of what 'American Exceptionalism' really is, out to the public. Ideas that meet my picky-ass standards and I'm damn hard to impress. And what I find here in my new home...impresses the hell out of me. I feel 27 again. I'm ready to have some damn fun. I'm ready to massage some brains with info AND art. With data AND humor. With reality NOT fantasy.

George Carlin said: "They call it the American Dream because you have to be asleep to believe it." He was right. The former years of my life that I spent trying to attain it -- was a nightmare.

Thank Goddess, and thank you, Bloomington, for my wake up call.

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TRC features media analysis, social critiques and spiritual refreshments focused on the socio/cultural impacts of a post-9/11, post-carbon, ponzi scheme world teetering on the edge of mass awakening or mutually assured destruction.

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